Blizzard on Zooming in, and Custom Monster Death Animations

Bashiok has continued his recent run of forum activity, with a few more interesting comments today. First up is a reply to a fan hoping for a zoom feature in Diablo 3. No luck, so far.

Still no plans to have a zoom function. There’s a very slight zoom used more as a cue to the player when you enter a conversation with an NPC, but it’s very subtle and doesn’t count for what you’re talking about.

But your character is shown in all its up-close and rotatable glory on the character selection screen. At least currently.

Newcomers might want to check out the early, long since abandoned storybox zoom in, seen only in the WWI 2008 gameplay movie. As for the current zoom-in feature, it was active in the BlizzCon build last year, and it was… okay. The zoom was fairly slight, as if you’d lowered your resolution from about 1042 to 800, but it did work, in terms of giving you the sense that your character was communicating with the NPC—while leaving most of the screen visible, so you could bail out if danger threatened or you saw something more interesting OOH SHINY!

Elsewhere, Bashiok replied to a post by FriskyDingo, in which he asked about customized monster death animations.

For instance.. a fire enhanced monster could have swirls of fire coming in towards him when he sort of “Implodes.” I invision swirls of fire going into him as he dies.. he is shrunk into a sort of little flaming ball.. and *then* it explodes in a fiery fashion.

This could be good for any elemental enhanced type of unique, and gives a much better feeling of dark energies stored within them making them much more powerful.

Bashiok: This already occurs with rares if they have an elemental enhancement. If they have a cold affix; when they die it’s sort of like watching a tiny ice planet implode. It’s almost exactly as you described.

Well I’d hope so, after all even simple old 2D D2 had appropriate death animations for Cold and Fire Enchanted monsters. (And is there anything more annoying than a CE + Cursed boss dying, and sticking Amplify Damage on you for about 5 minutes thanks to his death animation Frost Nova hitting one of your minions?) So it’s not a new feature, but it sounds like D3 will upgrade the visuals appropriately. Plus, we know that some SuperUnique bosses have original and apparently unique death animations, such as the Thousand Pounder dying in a reverse animation of his creation, with the flesh melting off of the bones, which then explode outwards.

If you want to know what sort of effects we’ll be seeing, check out the list of all known (14, so far) boss modifiers in Diablo 3, on the Bosses page of the wiki.

Comments

This is very cool. i want the entire game fiction shown in hieroglyphics like this. Reminds me of how the narrators in Lovecraft’s stories always conveniently found some wall with murals depicting the entire history of that culture.